Cop-Outs

This is a much-condensed version of a post I've tried to work on a couple of times and somehow never finished.

In a debate I saw a transcript of between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, Collins tries to argue that the best explanation for the unlikeliness of a life-supporting universe is God. He basically says that since God needs no explanation, he's not unlikely at all. I've heard similar arguments before: God never did 'come into being,' so he needs no explanation for how one could come into being out of nothing. That sort of thing. My math professor today made an off-hand joke along similar lines, talking about how an empty set generates only the zero vector/element/whatever, and saying that "only God can generate something out of nothing." I don't know that he's religious, and I'm certainly not mentioning this to impugn him in any way.

But my point is that I must agree with Richard Dawkins, who calls such an argument "the mother of all cop-outs." Why in the world does God get to be exempt from the rules of science and logic (which are really very similar to one another)? After all, one of the things that characterizes science is that it automatically expands to encompass every question of fact: it is, after all, only a method for acquiring rigorous knowledge and the sum total of all knowledge acquired through that method, and the method is one which wants naturally to take on each and every matter of fact. So if God exists, and by "exists" I mean in a way other than as a sort of emotional quantity or whatever that people can feel inspiring/supporting/whatevering them, then science engulfs him. I don't see how he/she/it can escape this fate without destroying the very definition of science, i.e. that it wishes to explain anything and everything. And if we're allowed to let our God exist with no beginning time and no ending time, why can't we do the same for our universe? (In fact, I've heard a scientific theory along those lines, but I still don't quite get it. Whatever; that's another story.) When my pro-religious interlocutor asks me, why is there something instead of nothing? and I say, I don't know, do you?, he (it's usually a he) will say something like, "because of God!" and then protest when I try to ask why there is God instead of nothing. But what justifies that protest? I don't get it. If God exists as a factual matter, if there is truly some sort of entity with the power to call into being our universe and everything in it, then I think I have a right to ask how the hell it got there.